Saturday, January 17, 2015

Too Soon, Blackhand, Too Soon!

1, we only had eight weeks from Mythic unlocking in Highmaul to Blackrock Foundry opening (and we'll need to clear Heroic Blackrock Foundry the week it opens so that week is shot). Not only does that mean we had to basically average a boss per week, we had to do so with finals for students, work schedule changes due to the holidays, and family events/trips that go along with the end of the year. Realistically we only had about six weeks to clear Mythic Highmaul.

2, Blizzard indicated they wanted to do this differently than how they handled Mogu'shan Vaults and Heart of Fear/Terrace of Endless Spring. They said they didn't like how MSV wasn't out for nearly long enough. Well, guess what? They're doing it again. MSV was out for a month with six bosses, HM will be out for a month and a half with seven bosses. Not exactly much difference there.

3, based on the last two expansions (Cataclysm and Mists of Pandaria), I feel like my guild has had a stable pattern: we clear the hardest difficulty with a month or two left in a typical raid tier while only raiding two nights a week. Our general ranking in the US/world has stayed roughly the same, so that's another metric to go by -- not like we're suddenly doing much worse or much better relatively speaking. Yet we're only 5/7M at the moment with six more raid days to go. Which means we'll hope to kill Ko'ragh this week (haven't even pulled him yet) and then extend our Mythic lockout for the next two weeks to try to get Imperator. Hopefully we'll manage to get 7/7M but it's going to be close regardless. This is also reminding me of the launch of Throne of Thunder (that Blizzard also said was much too soon) where we killed Heroic Sha of Fear the night before ToT hit. In this case I understood that it was a mini-tier and that we wouldn't be farming for a month or two before BRF hit, but I expected us to be able to clear 7/7M without extending at a minimum.

4, speaking of extending, Blizzard is on the record saying they don't want people to be extending! They want people to get some more gear each week to help make the bosses easier and did not like how people felt compelled to extend to try to finish in time before the next tier (believe this was in tier 14, aka MSV/HoF/ToES). But guess what? Extension time!

5, between the extension and lack of farm time, we're also going to be behind on gear. The typical pattern is the guilds raiding more per week race ahead and finish faster, then we eventually catch up in progress and then have time to at least mostly catch up in gear before the next tier hits. But we're going to be severely behind in gear for BRF this time around. So we're at a further disadvantage than usual.

I am definitely not happy with the situation. Even another week or two would make a huge difference -- when they said BRF was coming out in February I didn't imagine it would be the very first week! Not after what they said about wanting to avoid repeating the mistake of MSV.